Scott Harris addresses Detroit Tigers’ end of 2025 MLB season, looks ahead to 2026

Scott Harris addresses Detroit Tigers’ end of 2025 MLB season, looks ahead to 2026

to start. Thank you all for being here and thank you for our coverage of us all year. I know it led to like really grueling travel, especially this week, but we appreciate you guys all showing up and we appreciate you guys bringing Tigers baseball to our fans all year long. Um, before I get into questions, I just want to talk generally about a few thoughts that are rattling in my head and that have been for the last few days. Um, I think first and foremost, like I I wish we weren’t here right now. I wish we were in Toronto uh preparing for for game two of the ALCS. We were really close to to being in Toronto right now. Uh, but we’re not. We didn’t achieve our ultimate goal of of winning the World Series and and now we’re here at a press conference. And I think anytime you get to the playoffs and you fail to to win a World Series, it leaves a really bitter taste in your mouth. Um, I very much feel that. I’ve felt it all weekend. I know AJ feels it. I know a bunch of our players and coaches feel that. Um, and I expect us to feel that for a while. Um, I also expect that bitter taste in our mouths to drive us this offseason, to drive our players individually to make gains, um, and to drive us as a group to make sure that we can build off of some of the good things that happened this year. Um, I think the other thing that really sticks in my head is this this season was full of emotional swings. Uh, really big emotional swings. There were times when this team looked like it was rolling. We were executing at a really high level in all phases of the game. We were putting a ton of pressure on opposing starters in the first inning, driving up pitch counts, uh, holding the zone, coming through in big spots, um, and playing a brand of baseball that could beat opposing teams in a number of ways. There were also times this year where we were fighting through through adversity. We were not holding the zone. We were not executing in big spots. We were not playing clean and consistent baseball in all phases of the game. we were struggling to recapture the momentum that really drove this team for the first five months. Um, those emotional swings combined with the passion with which our fans follow and support this team created some really high highs and some really low lows. I felt those highs and I felt those lows and I was right there with our fans um in all of those moments. In some ways, it felt like this season was multiple seasons in one. Um, multiple very different seasons in one. And we got to we got to take a hard look at all of it. We got to take all the good and we got to take all the bad. And we got to learn from all of it. Um, however, I think in in our in my job, it is really important for me to step back and look at the entire season. It’s really important for me to look at it from a 30,000 foot view. And I think when you do that, it is hard to characterize this season as anything other than another big step forward for an organization that’s come a really long way in a short period of time. Among things that we did this year, we won more games than we did last year. We had six allstars, the most in in all of baseball. We got to the postseason two consecutive years for the fifth time in over 100 years in this organization. We won another postseason series and we earned our eighth postseason win in two years. Um I think that’s the third most in all of baseball. We had many players on on our big league team that took a big step forward. We entered the season with the number one overall farm system and many of our most important prospects had dominant seasons on their way to some of them reaching the postse or reaching the the the big leagues in 2026. Um, and I think the most important thing when I reflect on the entire season is we went a calendar year from late August to late August with the most major league wins of any organization in baseball. And we finished the 2025 season with the best overall organizational record of any organization in the sport. Those are really big deals. Those are really hard to do. Our players and our coaches in that clubhouse deserve a ton of credit for all that stuff. I’m really proud of them for all that stuff. That’s really hard to do and it’s in especially impressive for a young group that’s still entering their prime right now. So, we got a lot to be proud of from from this season. Now, I understand here like the arc of our season is not doing us any favors here. Anytime you have five dominant months and then you perform as poorly as we did in September, it raises questions. I’m sure you guys are going to ask me a lot of those questions. You deserve like I deserve to to get those questions and we deserve the negative narratives that are uh swirling around this team. However, I think it is important to have some perspective here. Like we if we had sequenced our season differently but got to the same place. Like by way of example, if we had stumbled out of the gate and had a really tough April and then posted five dominant months from May through September, I think the mood around this team is very different. I think the narratives around this team were very different. Even if we had gotten to the same place, how we got to this place, I think is important. And I think that’s driving a lot of the conversation around this team right now. And we deserve that because anytime you sequence this season the way we did, we deserve to have these questions. And me personally, I can’t be naive to what I saw in September. I can’t be naive to some of the struggles that we faced in the biggest moments. I can’t be naive to the fact that we got to get a whole lot better at a lot of things in this organization. We did all these things that I listed, all these achievements, which are really impressive and I’m really proud of, but we got to get a whole lot better in a lot of different areas. And some of those areas I wanted to share at the outset here. Like the first thing is our approach at the plate. In the big leagues, it seemed like our approach started to deteriorate down the stretch. We posted a really highpowered offense that performed in many of the most important categories for five months and then we really stumbled down the stretch. We got to figure out why. We got to understand why our approach seemed to deteriorate down the stretch. And we got to understand the adjustments that we do need to make to put together an entire season of, you know, a high performing offense instead of just five months and then struggling down the stretch. I think the second area that we need to look into is contact. We need to make more contact as a organization. We need to move the baseball more in the big leagues than we are. This has been a theme for the last two years. I think there are a lot of players on our team right now that have some swing and miss in their games. Um, but I think there are some things that we can do to improve upon it. I’m sure we’ll talk about it today. Um, but the time for that is now. Like we need to start making those gains right now. Um, we need to make sure that we have a team next year that can consistently across six months make enough contact to be a productive offense. I think if you go back and you look at our season, the months in which we made more contact, we were one of the best offenses in baseball. If you take a look at June, which was the lowest strikeout rate month that we had this season, we also had the best offense in baseball. When this group does move the ball, we can do a lot of damage. We can score a lot of runs. We got to find a way to be able to do that more consistently. And there’s some ways that we have already talked about that we’re working on immediately. Um, I think the third thing that we need to get a lot better at is, uh, we need to improve our health and consistency on the mound. I think if you go back and look at this season, we had a ton of injuries out of the gate. We had a ton of injuries and we had a steady stream of injuries throughout the entire season. It affected us on both sides of the ball, but I think it affected us more on the pitching side. I think some of the injuries that we had in the big leagues and the minor leagues started to thin out our depth and we weren’t able to produce that second wave of pitching this year in August and September that we needed to supplement this team. We did it last year. We added some really important arms that helped us, you know, go 30 and one and 11 down the stretch. We weren’t able to do that and I think the injuries and the setbacks that we faced in both the big leagues and the minor leagues were a significant contributing factor um to to the struggles that we faced down the stretch. We got to find a way as an organization to make some adjustments to keep our players healthier and performing better deeper into the season because the expectations have changed around here. We’re trying to play a seven-month season instead of a six-month season. We need to make those changes to to help make sure that we have reinforcements in August and September that can help us. And I think the last one is um something I’ve talked about a lot, but we got to continue to get better. We have to continue to get better at breaking young players into the big leagues. Um, I’ve talked about it since the day I got here and I’ve been very outspoken about trying to make sure that the environment that Cole Keith and Parker Meadows jump into is better than the environment that Riley Green and and Spencer Torlson jumped into. And then the environment that Dylan Dingler jumped into is better than the environment that Cole Keith and Parker Meadows jumped into. We got to keep making progress there because it’s too important to our future. We’ve talked a lot about our last three drafts. We’ve talked a lot about some of the players coming through the minor leagues. Those guys are really close. A lot of them are going to help help us next year. And we got to make sure that the environment that they’re jumping into is going to get the absolute most out of them. And that work starts right now. We got to prepare the environment for these guys to be able to jump on this team as soon as next year and make this team better, not struggle in the first two, three, four months to adjust to big league pitching and to help this team get better. It’s too important to our future and it’s something that we need to take very seriously as soon as today. So, some areas. Um, happy to take any any of your questions. Agent is here to uh to take the questions from the manager seat. But, um, what do you guys got?

Detroit Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris opened his news conference with a long statement Oct. 13, 2025, at Comerica Park. Video by Evan Petzold, DFP.

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